by Leah Wilde
I threw the hair down at her. She groaned again. “Your turn to lie down and take it, bitch,” I said. Then I turned and ran down the alley, back towards the fire.
I had a man to find.
Chapter 33
Dominic
A Few Minutes Earlier
The explosion went off silently at first. It took a brief second before the sound hit my ears. When it did, I felt it as much as I saw it. The heat, the din, the smell—it all collided into my senses at once. I was thrown backwards and slammed into the side of a brick building. My left arm was numb up to the shoulder, but the whole rest of my body was alive and wailing in pain.
I slid to the ground, dazed, while the soundless roar of my damaged hearing bellowed in my eardrums. The fires had taken root amongst the debris littering the abandoned facility. Heaps of garbage sizzled, sending smoke coursing up into the sky and forming a thick blanket of grey that choked out the sky overhead.
I looked forward and saw, dotted between the pillars of fire, the bodies of the Capparelli men who had been standing closest to the bomb when it exploded. They were hideously burnt, damn near barbecued, with faces and limbs melted into shapes that looked barely human. The guns they’d been holding were reduced to twisted, molten lumps of iron, useless for anything other than pinning their sorry corpses to the earth. Good. Let them fucking stay there forever.
I scanned left and right. I wanted to see Antonio’s dead body, get a glimpse of the horrified shock that would surely be seared onto his face. I frowned. He was nowhere to be seen. Emilio, too, had vanished.
Using the wall to support my weight, I lumbered to my feet. The trigger of the gun in my hand was stuck, rendering it unusable. I tossed it aside. I didn’t think I’d need it again anyway.
The heat was becoming unbearable. The tall stacks of the plant kept most of it trapped down below, where I was, turning this open courtyard into a hellish sauna for the dead. I needed to get out of here immediately before the quickly diminishing supply of oxygen forced me to pass out.
I didn’t want to go back to the vans we’d arrived in. If any of the Capparellis had managed to survive the blast, they’d be sure to regroup there. Instead of going there, I started staggering across the courtyard in the direction that Jawbone had come from. With any luck, I’d find one of their bikes parked that way.
I limped to the edge of the circle of white halogen light. I took one glance into the shadows that lay beyond there and then looked away as vomit rose in my stomach.
The Broken Bones were stretched out in a row. Each of them bore a bloody hole in the front and back of their heads. They’d been executed gangland-style, judging by the path the bullets had taken through their skulls. I forced myself to turn back and pay each of them the moment of silence they deserved.
One by one, I walked down the row and paused briefly in front of each body. If the man’s eyes were open, I bent down and used two fingers to pull them shut. They were cold already. The life was long gone.
It took everything I had not to break down when I reached Jawbone at the end of the line. His arms had fallen to either side of his torso. I picked them up and crossed them over his chest. Blood caked his forehead, forming a thick, maroon scab in the areas where it had dried.
I fell to one knee, careful not to let my shattered wrist knock against anything. It still hung at a grotesque angle, but I ignored that for the moment.
I couldn’t believe this was how it ended for Jaw. My president, the one who’d taken me in and told me what had to be done to get the revenge I was seeking. He’d picked up where Slim had left off, showing me what it meant to be a man. He taught me what pain was, how to use it to my advantage. How a broken bone can grow stronger in the aftermath of the trauma that hurt it in the first place.
“I’m sorry I couldn’t do better for you, Jaw,” I murmured. “I tried. I really did.”
Behind me, the fires were growing hotter. They had begun to spread outwards, catching on the wooden frames of windows and doors in the offices that surrounded the courtyard. Whatever they could eat, they did, multiplying and intensifying with every scrap of garbage or patch of grass. They were insatiable.
The heat lapped at my skin. I didn’t have much longer before this place, too, was consumed by the flames. I supposed it was fitting, like a funeral pyre for the warriors in front of me. They’d fought the good fight and paid dearly for it. But I knew these men. They wouldn’t have had it any other way.
I stood. Time to leave.
Then the fist rammed into the side of my head.
I lurched backwards, falling against a broad vertical pipe, as the second and third punches railed into my face. Stars exploded behind my eyelids. I slumped to the floor and raised my hands over my head to shield myself from the blows. Still, they rained down upon me with a fury.
I peeked between my crossed forearms and saw Antonio’s maniacal scowl. He was attacking me with a boundless, coked-out energy. What his hits lacked in power they made up for in volume. Again and again, he brought hammer fists smashing against my arm.
One swung wide and clipped my broken wrist. I felt the skin give way to a shard of bone stabbing through. It looked like a mountain peak above a river of blood.
“Die, motherfucker, die!” he shrieked endlessly. He cocked one foot back to swing it at me. As he did, I took my chance and lashed out my own kick. It smashed into the side of the knee bearing all his weight.
His face went white as a sheet as the ligaments tore and the knee buckled inwards in a way it was never meant to go. Instantly, he fell to the ground.
I cautiously lowered my hands to see if he was awake. His body lay crumpled at an awkward angle and his eyes were closed. I rolled forward onto my knees, wincing as my wrist shot steel rods of pain all the way up to the joint in my shoulder. Looking into his face, I paused. His chest wasn’t moving.
I sighed. He appeared to be unconscious, and I wasn’t going to wait around to see what he would be like when he woke up. I planted my right hand into the ground and started pushing myself up.
Just then, though, his eyes fluttered wide open. He opened his mouth and emitted a jaw-clattering screech, then his arm rocketed forward and pulled hard on the wrist I was using to support myself.
I fell onto my right side with a heavy thump. He threw a wild punch into my cheek, then leaped on top of me. The battering resumed, a veritable hailstorm of elbows and knuckles descending into my ribs, my arms, my head. I tried to shield him off, but he still managed to land punch after punch.
Loading all my power into one knee, I drove it upwards into the soft part of his abdomen. He gasped and relented long enough for me to toss him off of me.
I tried to scoot back to the wall so I could hoist myself onto my feet, but he recovered too quickly. He dove into me, swung around behind, and wrapped his arm around my neck, leaning back so that the entirety of his strength was dedicated to cutting off my air flow. I started to choke.
“You rat!” he bellowed. “Filthy rat!”
I desperately swayed my right arm around behind my head, trying to find leverage to shove him off of me, but he ducked and avoided my grasp. The power in my body was fading, too starved of air to continue functioning. I was sliding into blackness. I had enough power in me for one more effort.
Roaring, I kicked hard into the ground and shoved him back into the wall. His head hit the wall with a sickly crunch and his grasp around my throat instantly went limp. I tucked and rolled away from him, coming to a rest a yard away. A fire blazed next to me, soaking me in powerful heat. One skinny steel pole stuck out of the inferno.
Antonio sat up and pressed a hand against the spot in his head where it had hit the wall. When he pulled it away, I saw a smear of blood shining on his palm. He looked at me in a daze. I started once more to push myself back up to standing. I managed to rise to one knee.
A rotund figure rounded the corner. In his two chubby hands, Emilio held a gun with the business end directed towards me. His i
njured leg dragged behind him. The heat had cauterized the wound, so that the blood no longer ran in a thick stream down his leg.
Antonio saw him and his eyes damn near popped out of his head. He began barking orders immediately. “Kill him! Kill him!” he said, pointing a bony finger straight at me. “Fire the fucking gun!”
Emilio looked at me, eyes wide. He cocked the hammer back. I closed my eyes. Go ahead, I thought to myself. Pull the fucking trigger.
But the gun never went off.
I opened my eyes after one beat too many had passed by. Emilio had collapsed into a bloody puddle on the ground. Standing over him was Isabel. She held a brick in one hand, covered with the blood of the man at her feet.
She looked up at me. Her eyes shined in the fire. It reflected off of her skin, her air. She looked like she was glowing. The air shimmered with the heat surging through it, blurring her outlines, turning her more and more angelic as the seconds ticked by.
Goddamn. I didn’t understand what she did to me. But I wasn’t done finding out.
A blur of motion to the bottom right corner of my vision broke the spell between us. Antonio was lunging for the gun Emilio had dropped.
Acting without thinking, I bent down and picked up the steel pole hanging out of the fire. The heated metal seared my skin instantly, but I ignored the pain. What was a little more agony when you were already as broken as I was?
Raising it over my head, I brought it crashing down on top of his skull. The pole scythed through scalp, skull, and brain, sending for a geyser of bloody fluid. Antonio went limp.
This time, it was for good.
Isabel looked at me. I looked at her. I didn’t say a word as I stuck out my hand. She stepped forward tentatively and took it. Our fingers were slick with sweat, blood, and ash, but it didn’t matter. Beneath all that was skin. Hers and mine. Whole, for the most part. And close together. That was what mattered.
We walked out of the plant, leaning against one another for support. The heat gradually lessened as we moved away from the area where the bomb had exploded, but we could still hear the groan of melting rivets as the huge sheets of metal gave way to the greedy flames.
My throat burned with the acrid rasp of the chemicals we’d ingested. There was no way that shit was good for either of us, but as we coughed and hacked, a laugh began to bubble up. I looked at Isabel and, for some strange reason, a smile broke out over my face. The laugh took me over, growing stronger and stronger, until I had to stop and rest my hands on my knees because I was laughing so hard.
“What’s so funny?” she asked me, astonished.
It took me a long time before I was calm enough to answer. “I did it,” I finally said. “I fucking did it.”
# # #
We found a crowd of motorcycles huddled at the outskirts of the plant. I recognized the big yellow one. It was Jawbone’s. The keys dangled from the ignition. I gave the handlebars a quick pat. Maybe, somewhere deep in the mechanical guts, a little part of him still lingered in here.
I helped Isabel onto the back of the bike. After she was settled, I swung my leg over, mounted in front of her, and put my hand on the keys.
I paused for a moment. The distant fires were no longer audible. The night around us was still. No animals moved or chirped, no cars passed by on the road. There was silence.
Then I twisted the keys and felt the thrum of the engine between my legs. Opening the clutch, I rolled back on the throttle. Gas combusted. Wheels spun.
Isabel and I took off down the road, leaving behind everything that we’d ever known.
Epilogue
Isabel
Two Weeks Later
Mexico was beautiful. The sky during the days we’d been here have been nothing but the purest azure shade, stretching unbroken from the mountains in the west to the Gulf in the east. The air was like a warm kiss on my skin. No more cold Chicago winters, no more snow. I never wanted to be anywhere but here, next to the beach, where I could hear the waves whispering as they slid onto the smooth sand and back out again, over and over, like a lullaby.
I padded down the sidewalk with a bag of tacos and a cardboard container of rice and beans in my hands, dinner for two. The sun was just starting to nuzzle against the horizon. Beams of purple and bronze slinked between the low rooves of the white adobe buildings. The whole world was awash in color. I smiled, unable to help myself. It was just too dang pretty.
I made my way to the cottage at the end of the street. It looked just like the rest. The roof was thatched with straw, a palm tree in the front yard held its leafy fronds out over the small porch, and the walls were daubed with streaky white paint. It, too, was perfect.
My sandals made a shushing noise as I walked across the dry grass. I caught sight of myself in a mirror and paused. In just two weeks I looked like a new person. The bruises and scratches had faded and my once pale skin was beginning to look tan. It was an unfamiliar change but a welcome one. My hair was also lightening, the very ends of it turning from midnight black to a slightly lighter shade of brown, courtesy of the beaming Mexican sun. I hadn’t gotten it cut in a while and it was reaching nearly to the small of my back. I thought I’d keep it, though. The look was growing on me.
“Gonna stand there forever looking at yourself, or are we gonna eat?” came a gruff voice.
I jumped, startled. Dominic was sitting on the porch looking at me with a wry smile on his face. He wasn’t wearing a shirt, and I could see that he was tanning even faster than I was. The unmarked stretches of skin left between his colorful tattoos had become a rich brown. It made his eyes even more shocking than they usually were. Underneath his dark hair, they shone at me, twinkling and mysterious.
“Coming,” I trilled, taking the steps in one bound. I set the food on the rickety table that the previous owners left for us on the front porch. I started to move towards the unoccupied chair on the other side of the table, but Dom snaked an arm out around my waist and pulled me towards him.
“Get over here, girl,” he growled playfully as he tugged me onto his lap.
I yelped and giggled until he swooped down and locked his lips against mine. His tongue delved between my teeth while he slide a hand underneath my neck to support my head.
I moaned softly. His taste never got old.
He broke it off but kept his face close to mine. Up close, his eyes almost consumed my whole field of vision. I could see a thousand different shades of blue surfacing and submerging like dolphins frolicking in the oceans of his irises.
“Took your sweet time coming home, didn’t ya?” he teased. He nipped at my nose.
I shrieked and jerked my head away, laughing. “Well, if I’d known you were sitting around shirtless, maybe I would have hustled a little more,” I shot back with a grin. “Then again, maybe I should make you cover up. Can’t have all these local ladies thirsting after my man.”
“I’ve been beatin’ away with a stick since the minute you walked out the door,” he joked. “I told him over and over, ‘I love Isabel!’ but they just won’t listen. Probably ’cause they don’t speak English.”
“Mm, I can see how that would be a barrier. Wait, do me one favor.”
“What’s that?”
“Say again what you told them?”
He smiled, sun-chapped lips splitting to reveal a row of glistening white teeth. “I told them, I love Isabel.”
“Say it again.”
“I love Isabel.”
“One more time.”
He stood suddenly, hoisting me into the air by my waist like a ballerina as he bellowed at the top of his lungs, “I love Isabel!” A flock of seagulls in the palm tree out front took wing, startled by the sudden outburst.
I laughed, reveling in the words as I heard them again and again. That part would never get old, either. Dominic started to set me back down, but as he did, his leg failed beneath him and we both went tumbling to the ground. I landed on top of him. His body absorbed the worst of my fall, but I still manag
ed to knock my elbow against the wooden slats of the porch. Pins and needles ricocheted along my forearm.
Among all these sunshine and euphoria, it was easy to forget how little time had passed since everything we went through in Chicago. We were both trying to put it out of our minds, but sometimes our bodies refused to cooperate. Dominic was still battered and his left wrist was still encased in a makeshift plaster cast. The cuts riddling both of us would no doubt turn into scars that would last for a very long time. Ignoring the past was easy, but forgetting it was much harder.
I scrambled to roll onto my knees next to him. His eyes were closed but his chest was rising and falling slowly. As I stroked the side of his face, his eyes fluttered open. Thank God.
“Dom, are you alright?” I questioned anxiously.
He looked at me steadily, not saying a word for a few long seconds. Then he gently cupped my chin in his hand and pulled me towards him for a light kiss. “Never better,” he whispered.